


jiongu

by selwyn



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-25 20:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21362038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selwyn/pseuds/selwyn
Summary: Kakuzu has had a long, long life. Six prompts for six moments.-His heartbeat felt like the slowest one, pausing long seconds between each beat like it wondered - should I go on? should I keep doing this? - until it came, a drum beat, the rumble of the deep earth, the groaning gasp of the dark things underground.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	jiongu

aspectabund - letting emotion show easily through the face or eyes

Hari is in labor with their son for twenty-four hours. A day of pain, blood, and back-breaking pressure on her spine until a final push forces him out. He doesn’t need a slap - he comes out wet and screaming, so furious that it echoes around the rocks, and Hari could have wept. Her husband, Ito, cradles him, this infant thrusting his fists out in indignation, and his face shines with tears as he comes to her and presses his lips to her sweaty forehead.

“A son,” he says into her ear. “Our son.”

He is perfect, this tiny thing with such endless rage, and she begins to weep too.

_(they live in a world that is not kind to children and they both know what that means)_

* * *

Kakuzu learns with frightening speed and it is both a blessing and a curse. Hari sometimes looks at her son, this dark-eyed boy who is brilliantly smart and capable of so much even though he is only four, and she feels both sad and happy. Sad, because he is too smart to be her little boy for long, and happy, because he will be so strong.

_(she loves him. oh god, she loves him. it’s like a physical ache inside her, as red as blood and as strong as the waterfall, beating in time with her heart. she sees Ito when he looks at their son, and she knows he feels it too)_

Her boy is endlessly energetic, a hellion of a thing. He cries loud, he yells loud, he laughs loud. He runs through the woods without a damn care, covered in dirt and scabs, all skinny knees and wild hair, and they both encourage him. There is one day that he falls in the spring outside their home and wails, clutching a bloody knee, and Hari holds her husband back before he can comfort him.

_(her boy’s eyes are so bright, so green; like new grass or leaves under sunlight. when he feels something, he feels it with such splendid intensity that his eyes glitter like sunlight on water)_

“He needs to handle it alone,” she insists. “Don’t make a fuss.”

_(children must learn that help will not always come)_

Eventually, Kakuzu does. Sometimes if it really hurts, he’ll sob and need a parent, but Hari watches him learn to move on. She’s proud, even when her heart aches and she cries into Ito’s shoulder at night, but he slowly stops coming to them. There are days she sees him come back home with scraped hands and bloody-raw feet, but he says nothing and they say nothing, and little by little, the tears stop.

_(this world is not kind to infants, but even crueler to young boys with dazzling eyes. they love him, they love him so much, and that is why they need to hurt him first)_

* * *

rubatosis - the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat

Reading about something and understanding it were oceans apart. It was why so many people were so foolish. Why they did things without thinking.

Kakuzu couldn’t sleep the first night after the Jiongu. Nor the second. He crawled from hole to hole, exhausted, weary, all his limbs shaking like dead leaves in winter wind, feeling sick but having nothing to throw up. The vanishingly few times he collapsed, so tired that his pounding head and twisting chest could be ignored, may have been the only thing attaching his sanity to his crumpled brain.

When it was quiet, Kakuzu could hear his heartbeat. _(heartbeats)_

He didn’t count it anymore. He couldn’t stand the silence either.

_(in the silence, he heard five heartbeats that didn’t match each other)_

_air_   
(elder Ichiro, beating like a hummingbird, still afraid as he was when he watched the doors to the council room slam open)

_lightning_   
(elder Kenji, a constant pulse-pulse-pulse of energy, a low-level thrum that Kakuzu could feel in his teeth)

_water_   
(elder Sabu, a wet-eyed man who’d wept for his life, his head on the ground, please and please and please until his head was smashed into pulp)

_fire_   
(elder Shiro, the last, the one who’d raged and roared at him even when his guts spilled at his feet like slippery eels)

His heartbeat felt like the slowest one, pausing long seconds between each beat like it wondered - _should I go on? should I keep doing this?_ \- until it came, a drum beat, the rumble of the deep earth, the groaning gasp of the dark things underground.

_Suffer, _whispered his heart to the four others. They were in the dark with him, rotting with nowhere to go. _This is the grave we share now._

* * *

petrichor - the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a long period of dry weather

It rained the day after he left Takigakure - fat droplets from a heavy sky, splashing down one at a time before the clouds ripped themselves open and released an ocean. Kakuzu could have moved under the trees for protection, or found shelter, but he lingered. It soaked him from head to toe, plastered his hair to his skull, and he felt the curious sensation of being in his body but also not.

_(the rain in Taki was always warm and everything turned soft and misty, as gentle as a dream)_

He felt like he could have drowned in the downpour, turn his face into it and open his mouth to let it fill his lungs. As if heaven itself meant to wash him clean, inside and out.

_(when you’re in prison, there is never enough. not enough food, not enough water, not enough light - the hunger sets in like a parasite, always gnawing. but the filth, the fucking **filth**)_

The water streamed over his upturned face, down the sides of his neck. It carved through the caked layers of dirt on his skin and seeped into the cracks of his scars, as warm as a mother’s touch.

_(he has been stained, and not only by the dirt and scars. the stains his people have given him are on his wrists; the black rings that marked him traitor and betrayer, someone whose dishonor needed the permanence of needle and ink so that even strangers will know his shame)_

For hours, his world was comprised of the wet smell of a drenched world. It was only him and the rain, the endless rain, the walking torrent dressed in mist and fog, this force that could sweep out the filth.

* * *

hiraeth - a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past

Kakuzu is many things, but ungrateful is not one of them. Sentiment will never sway him, but old age has weaned him of the prideful mistakes of the young - there are just some things you could never leave behind.

_(he’s had the time to make his mistakes and learn from them)_

It starts with a small box of incense. When Hidan starts to demand why, Kakuzu snarls, “Not _now.”_

Perhaps it’s the look on his face, or the uncharacteristic lack of build-up, but it is enough to make Hidan back down begrudgingly. Kakuzu knows to count his victories with his partner, so he accepts the temporary triumph for what it is and promptly abandons him without word at the nearest opportunity.

It will win him endless whining, but some things need to be done alone.

_(he doesn’t do this often, or on any set date. the reason he tells himself is because he is too busy and distant to do this every year on the right day, but the truth is that _ _it is personal, too personal, and it makes him uneasy)_

The waterfall thunders in a way that is distinct; it’s a sound that comforts him. The sound. The constant, rising mist. This is home before home, the place that molded the foundations for everything he would become.

_(he learns his first lesson of strength with the noise of the falls in his ears, as if the endless roar was in his heart, powerful and eternal)_

He places the two incense sticks in a little clay holder and lights them. Their smell is sweet and heady. It reminds him of a time before this one, when he was still the kind of man who burnt incense every year on the right day.

“I am turning ninety in two weeks,” Kakuzu says. He can feel the long years like they were physical weights, weighing down the lightning of his soul. His mother had been twenty-four years old when she died. His father had been twenty-two. Normal ages, by shinobi standards, but for him, it was young. So… young.

_(but the youngest casualty had been his heart - five years old and still in love with the world, until it struck him down)_

He says nothing more. The two sticks burn, dripping ash as they burn to little stubs.

Kakuzu is not a good son. He never will be. But he is not an ungrateful one.

* * *

temerate - to break a bond or promise

What was the bond between one’s body and soul? And what made someone human? What strange, ineffable quality was there to a man that he could call himself a man, whole and without blemish?

Kakuzu no longer bled. His skin could be cut, but then it peeled apart like paper, and dark, moving strings pulsed under the layers he pulled back, wet and slick like muscle. He could peel those apart too, examine the way the strings came apart with gluey resistance, and then he could put it all back in. His skin would push back together again, like meshing clay.

_(what would happen, if he peeled it all back, layer after layer? what would you get, if you sliced away his skin and separated each string, laid apart his wet, rancid hearts?)_

He could not age anymore. The years passed by him like mere suggestions, and his body stayed the same.

The first time he tried to eat something and felt it go down wrong, like he was swallowing up the wrong tube but different, like trying to take a step that wasn’t there -

He’d thrown up. He’d gorged up his guts with sickened fascination, black, bitter strings crawling out of his mouth like wriggling worms, and he’d wondered what he’d done to himself.

_(he still felt human but, what was it, to feel human?)_

* * *

morituro - of someone who is next or destined to die

Superstition had a peculiar place in the shinobi world. Most people didn’t have the time to think about it too deeply, and thus never made their peace with the other world. The ones who grew a little, who managed to squeeze out their minutes between red-stained death and petrified fear, wondered if they’d go to hell for strangling someone to death, white knuckles and salty tears in their mouth.

Kakuzu was, despite all opinions, a believer. But where men cried out for a nameless god to save their wretched souls, Kakuzu believed in the only one who mattered.

_(the god of death)_

Religion was still bullshit, of course. Prayer couldn’t save you. Prayer wouldn’t staunch the hot gush of your blood between your fingers or the fire-flash of breaking bones. Prayer wouldn’t keep you away from the stinking, screaming death of an useless idiot who wasn’t ready.

But, if you had to pray to anyone…

…pray to death.

_(and not the idols and images of false gods, the pieces of paper and trash who promise divinity and ambrosia for a life well-lived)_

The god of death was the man who held your throat in his sweating hands. The god of death was the woman cutting you open from shoulder to hip, blood in her teeth, murder in her eyes. The god of death was a child, small and soft, tearing your eyes out over the dead bodies of his parents. 

_(the one who holds power is your god, swine, and you shall look up at it and you shall pray for salvation. they are your lord of seconds, the king of second chances, that terrible and beautiful moment where everything can change. beg like a dog, on your hands and knees, and let judgement fall where it may)_

**Author's Note:**

> Kakuzu was my original love, even before Madara <3


End file.
